This is not a recipe book for ‘successful integration’, but rather practical guidance on how to engage a community and a society in making integration happen... The goal is to have people sit at the same table and take decisions together.
The PS Centre has released an Implementation Guide to Dynamic Integration as part of the FOCUS project. Co-created by integration-focused practitioners and policy makers, the guide provides actionable steps and explores different programmatic considerations to strengthen social connections, which is the core idea of the ‘FOCUS Approach to Dynamic Integration’.
Since 2019, the PS Centre has been leading FOCUS, an integration research project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme. FOCUS aims to help policy makers, civil society organisations and communities to understand important dimensions of dynamic integration with a particular focus on fostering social connections between arriving and receiving communities.
Anouk Boschma: “The most eye opening thing for me in the course of this project was that it started out from a ‘helping’ perspective. As in, we need to help refugees, we need to support them. No, we need to give communities the tools so they can develop or organise their community and society together, inclusive of all. One of the keynote speakers in our final conference is the Swedish Support Group Network (SGN), which originated from Save the Children Sweden’s community work with refugee families. Over time, their work resulted in a fully independent network, led by refugees themselves. SGN is now an equal partner to us in another research project. They fundraise themselves, to do research and other work that matters to refugees in Sweden. They have a seat at policy development tables in Sweden and Europe.”
Registrations are still open to attend the FOCUS Final Conference, ‘Living Well Together’, taking place 1 – 2 June 2022 in Brussels. The conference will review the past decade of dynamic integration in Europe and showcase the results of the FOCUS project from a research, practice and policy perspective. Participants will take part in the discussion, connect with projects and initiatives, and discover the approaches and resources developed by FOCUS.
“What we really hope is that integration becomes a responsibility of everybody, that all people have an equitable place in society, that they’re all actively participating in it, make active decisions about their own lives and become happier and more fruitful parts of society because of it,” says Anouk.
More information about the FOCUS project can be found on the FOCUS website.
Focus Final Conference - Living Well Together
Location
The conference takes place at La Tricoterie, in Brussels. Online participation is possible.
Registration
Attendance if free but upon registration only. Registrations to participate are possible here.
